CX Pulse Check And Book Day

Jeannie Walters 0:09

It's the Experience Action Podcast, and it's my favorite episode of the month. It's time for CX Pulse Check. Now, this time we're doing things a little bit differently because it's a special day here. So help me in welcoming my special co-host, Larissa Salazar. Larissa, so good to see you.

Larissa Salazar 0:28

Hi, Jeannie. I'm so glad to be here. And it is a very special day. So I'm pumped for this episode. Thank you so much for welcoming me in and letting me join you.

Jeannie Walters 0:39

Oh my gosh, I'm so thrilled you're here. Now, for those of you who don't know, Larissa is with Brand Builders Group, and she is also my strategist that I've been working with for a couple of years now about launching this book. And the book comes out today. It is called Experience is Everything. I love that you have it with you.

Larissa Salazar 1:02

Oh, I had to bring it.

Jeannie Walters 1:04

I love it. Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations. We'll drop the book link into the show notes. But of course, you can get this everywhere. You can order this wherever you find books. So, Larissa, I wanted to bring you into this conversation today. First of all, just as a moment of celebration and appreciation with you because you've been right along with me throughout this process. And you've also seen a lot of book launches, book publishing, all of those things. You've worked with a ton of authors at this point. So I just wanted to kind of have a conversation about the process and about the message. And I think we also live in a really noisy world right now. So how do you think, you know, messages break through and uh, you know, what can everybody kind of take away from that idea? How do you how do you get that message out there in the right way these days?

Why Write Experience Is Everything

Larissa Salazar 1:58

That is such an it's a really weighted question and conversation because launching a book is similar to launching a business. And that process can look very different for one person to the next, to one business to the next. And it's not a very linear path. Um, and so all authors that come in to bring their book to life, we really do encourage them like, hey, this is gonna be a journey. It's gonna be a good one and a rewarding one, but it is going to be a journey. And we tell authors oftentimes that a book is not a hypothesis, it is typically a conclusion or something very similar to a conclusion. You've tested these theories, these frameworks, these learnings, you've molded and shaped them over time and throughout the years. And then eventually people reach a place where they're ready to formalize it forever, get it published in a hardcover book and put it on the shelves for the masses. Um, and that could take a year, it could take three years, it could take seven years, but that process looks different for every single author. Um, and so, Jeannie, I I would love to hear from you. I know you it founded Experience Investigators back in 2009. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Jeannie Walters 3:26

That's right. Um 2009 is a lot of years to be in the industry in customer experience. And so I would I really want to hear from you what was the moment in time that you felt you were ready to formalize the experience is everything message and finally put it into a book? Well, that's a great question. It kind of reflects what you just talked about because, you know, for years I was writing every week in articles and blogs and things like that. So I feel like your point about like testing the hypotheses out, it's really, really important because doing that work and then also working alongside clients and figuring out like what will work with this and and adjusting and evolving the tools and the frameworks that we use, that was all a really important part of the process. And I didn't know that would end up with a book, but I think it was one of those things where I started realizing like we have something strong here. And I feel the I feel empathy for a lot of customer experience leaders because they're stuck, they get stuck in this world of reactivity all the time and being kind of held accountable for things they can't, they actually don't have anything to do with and they are um just put in a bad spot. And I kept seeing that. And so part of this was I was like, wow, if we got this into more hands, we could help more leaders. And I think that's a really big motivation as well to get the word out, right? Like you want more and more people to have the tools in this book. But man, when you say it's not linear, like I had starts and stops and you know, detours and all of those things. So people have asked me, like, how long did it take you to write the book? And I was like, I don't really know because part of it was already available through the work I was doing. Putting it together in a book is a is a whole new process. Um, so I learned so much.

Proactive Customer Experience Basics

Larissa Salazar 5:34

You have to put it together in a way that even the people and clients you're not able to work with one-on-one, or maybe clients who aren't yet working with Experience Investigators, they can still pick up the book and really take some tangible takeaways that they can go and implement into their business. And so teaching one-on-one is always a little bit different than teaching via a book, but it's such an awesome tool, even if somebody is just getting started in thinking through customer experience for the first time. Um, I was rereading the introduction this morning, and I reread the line that said, customer experience is proactive and customer service is reactive. Will you tell us a little bit more about that and how people can really step into that more proactive approach and then how the book will really help them kind of unlock that new mindset of thinking?

Jeannie Walters 6:28

Yeah, I love that you uh picked that one out. Because it's funny when I say I'm in customer experience, sometimes people automatically go to sharing their like worst customer service story with me.

Larissa Salazar 6:41

Of course. And it's because people always uh they remember the bad or they're louder about the bad more oftentimes than they are about the good, even though the good is so proactive so that we avoid some of the other things that we don't want our clients to experience.

Jeannie Walters 7:02

Right. And I think in those moments, if we're reaching out for customer support, using chat, reaching out for customer service, something's probably gone wrong. Something isn't right, we're expecting something that doesn't arrive or anything. And so when we think about customer service, it really is reacting to those moments in the journey. And there's a it's a really important thing, and it's a very it's important to include it in your overall customer journey. But when we are really thinking about how do we get intentional about designing the customer experience, then we can influence number one, how do we want our customers to feel, right? Like what is important about that? And number two, that also helps us influence the outcomes that the business gets. We're not leaving things to chance, we're being very proactive and intentional about designing that end-to-end customer experience, which is so critical for success. And I think I'm still seeing that a lot of organizations aren't thinking this way. And they're still being very reactive about things like, well, we're we're collecting surveys and we're watching the scores and we're doing these things, or we're we've we're training our customer service people really well. And again, all those things are important, but it's not the only thing. You really have to look at it from a holistic perspective as well.

Larissa Salazar 8:31

Yeah, I'm fortunate enough to know the content of the book really, really well. Um, for everybody who is listening, will you share a little bit about the mindset strategy and discipline framework that you kind of introduce in the book? And I want to really understand I have a question specifically about mindset, is when organizations and leaders are kind of falling into this reactive state. Where do you think they struggle the most? Is it the mindset piece? Is it the strategy piece? Is it the discipline piece? Where does it ultimately come down to the gap for most of these organizations or leaders?

Jeannie Walters 9:15

Yeah, that's like it sounds like such a simple question.

Larissa Salazar 9:20

I'm sure it's layered.

Mindset Strategy Discipline Foundations

Jeannie Walters 9:22

It is, but I yeah, the the whole and something that you and um my editors all helped me with as well was I have been doing this for a long time and I want everybody to know everything, right? Like I want to give you all the tools. And the reason we really zeroed in on this approach for the book around getting these foundations right, around the mindset strategy discipline, is because if you get that right, it makes everything else easier. You can build upon that foundation. So that was really the motivation behind that. And the mindset piece is so interesting to me because a lot of organizations say, oh, we put customers first, we are customer-centric, all of those things. But then if you walk around and ask five or six people, they all think of that differently. They don't necessarily know what that means. And so what we do is we try to get that mindset in a very explicit way using something called a customer experience mission statement. And so by doing that, we are able to really define what is it that we need to internalize? What is it that we need to make sure that we are all we we know how we show up no matter what for our customers? And that once you have that as your North Star, that does make everything easier. The strategy piece is that next step because a lot of times people go, Well, we have a great customer promise. So I don't understand why our customer experience isn't great. And it's just like any other part of the business. You have to actually create a plan, a strategy, a strategic vision, and then break down what does it mean to get there, and probably most importantly, understand how you will measure success. And that is probably the piece that is missing in most organizations. They just kind of skip that part. Um, or they have what they're calling a strategy, but when I look at it, it's actually things like we're just going to improve net promoter score. Well, that's customer feedback. So you have to influence that somehow. You can't just like wave a magic wand and hope for that. And that's a measurement, that's not really an outcome. So we need to make sure we're really understanding that. And we use something called a customer experience success blueprint, and that's really to define the strategy from the organizational um outcomes first and understanding leaders, what they care about, and then understanding what we can actually do, because we also want to be realistic. And then the discipline piece is really deciding like what in the toolkit do we need to pull out? What do we need to do every day? And when you compare it to any other part of the business, it makes more sense because I can't imagine a sales team being told, like, just go sell. That's your goal.

Larissa Salazar 12:07

Have fun.

Jeannie Walters 12:08

Yeah.

Larissa Salazar 12:09

Try your best.

Jeannie Walters 12:10

Yeah, exactly. And then coming back and be like, well, we didn't sell very much. Well, okay, I guess sales doesn't work. We're gonna get rid of it. So we we know that there are certain things like sales and marketing and operations that are just part of the business. I believe we have to start treating customer experience the same way, and that's how we're going to see the results that we know can happen when this is done well. I I've got one for you, Larissa.

Larissa Salazar 12:32

Okay.

Jeannie Walters 12:32

So as somebody like me who's a first-time author, but not a first-time writer, right? Like I've written a ton. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges for the experts that you've worked with who, again, like me, probably have a lot in their heads. They want everybody to know everything, and now we have to put it into book form. What are some of the challenges that you've seen?

Organizing Expertise For Real Readers

Larissa Salazar 12:57

Yeah, it's really one, the challenge is we assume that a lot of the things that we do on a day-to-day basis are common knowledge. Um, and the tricky part about that is if our clients were doing the things that we naturally do so well, they wouldn't have the problem that they're currently facing. And so authors a lot of time tend to overlook or disregard a lot of their most valuable information. And so, what it really takes for an author is to take a step outside of their day-to-day and what they naturally do within their current business and say, if I had to learn this from scratch, or if I had to teach, sometimes I say a third grader, um, what are all the tiny steps that I would take somebody through? Um, and oftentimes that ends up being a really long, exhaustive list, 20 things, 30 things, but then you find the common threads and you group them into very small digestible themes, very similar to what you did with mindset, strategy, and discipline, right? You could probably look back on all of your writings, all of your teachings, frameworks, exercises, things that you utilize within teaching your own client, and you say, okay, well, that fits in mindset, and this fits in strategy. So we have to take that step back. We have to write everything down. I like to call it putting it up all in the whiteboard. Um, but then you can really say, what are the pieces that are necessary for my client, my reader, my learner to have to understand in order to get them to the outcome that I really want them to be able to deliver for their people, experience within their organization or their business. And then you kind of wrap it up with an editor and all of your things into something, somewhat of a process that they can follow from start to finish, um, which is very similar to what you do when you tell people, hey, let's look at what your customer experiences from the moment they come in contact with your brand or your organization to when they leave, graduate, end their time with us, and then go share it with a friend, right? Um the process is actually very similar in that sense, but it does take time. So somebody who is not a a first-time author, somebody who, somebody who is a first-time author, but maybe not a first-time writer or creator of teaching and content and lessons, you probably have a book inside of you, um, or maybe inside of your computer hard drive that is very ready to be organized in an effective way to deliver to your people. Um and Jeannie, do you know? Sorry, to circle back to one of our earlier questions, what was there a time when you decided, okay, I feel confident that I have done enough change in the client experiences and organizations and the clients I worked with that I want to share this on a bigger scale with people? Because we want to work with everybody. I want to work with everybody too. There's not enough hours in the day sometimes.

Jeannie Walters 16:29

Right.

Larissa Salazar 16:30

But was there a moment that you said, now I gotta do it, I gotta share it with everybody?

Jeannie Walters 16:36

Um, it's funny because I was thinking about this, and one of the things that I think all of us do as entrepreneurs is we figure stuff out all the time, right? Like we're always evolving, we're always tweaking, we're always trying things out. And I did a series of client engagements with very different types of clients. And it was probably in the like 2018 to 2020 range. And I started realizing, like, oh, we are on to something here, right? Like the just seeing the results, seeing the feedback, there was so much energy around it. I was so energized by it. And so that was really where we crystallized the whole approach with the CX mission statement and how powerful that was. And I think that's another piece that, you know, a lot of organizations think, oh gosh, why are we spending time on this? We just want results. And it's like, but once you have that piece, it really does make everything else more straightforward. And then you can prioritize around it. And I think the other thing that pushed me from that was once we had that series of engagements, then even a year, two years, three years later, people were telling me, oh my gosh, this we've been using it this way, we've been rolling it out. So I was getting kind of two-way feedback on that approach too. And that's really what made me decide, you know what, that this is something we need to share and just to see the power of it. Um, but I think one of the one of the challenges that I had as an author is in today's world, in today's digital world, you can, you know, record a podcast, you can uh, you know, do uh an article or a blog, and you can always change those later, right? Like you can always take them down, you can edit them. The book is the book.

Larissa Salazar 18:29

Printed in hardcover. That's right.

Jeannie Walters 18:32

That's right. It's here, it's real, and it's very exciting to see it in this format. And at the same time, there was a part of me that the minute we decided the writing was done and the editing was done, and we were going into that print design phase, I was like, oh my gosh, I should have said this differently. I should have done this differently. And so I think that's just something that as if anyone's out there thinking about this, I think it's a really natural part of the process. Would you agree?

When The Book Becomes Permanent

Larissa Salazar 19:00

It is a very natural part of the process. And one of the things that I encourage most of my authors is your clients want to see that you are invested in the improvement and the growth of yourself and of your company, um, just as much as they are invested into the growth and improvement of their brand or company. And so if there ever is an Experience is Everything uh revised and edited version or 2.0, and that goes for all books. I think that is such a testament to the commitment that you as an author have to evolve and continue to grow your craft and expertise. Um, and so the minute that somebody says, that's good, I never have to look at it again, I almost say, hmm, are you sure? Yeah. Like, are are you are you sure? And so, especially in an industry like customer experience, when technology, AI, just all sorts of things will continue to evolve for years to come. Um, I think it goes to show that you cannot stop caring about the experience of your customer because it will all it will continue to change for the rest of time. And so the fact that you had already felt a little, a little tension when you turn it in final, I think that shows the commitment to it's never a one and done.

Jeannie Walters 20:30

Yeah. And I think the other thing that forced me to do was to think about what are the next steps. Like if somebody gets through this book, what do we want them to do? And so we have some resources, we have our membership, we have different ways so that they can, you know, stay current and stay connected, and we can keep improving what we're doing along with them. So it's just interesting because I think people think the book is kind of the finale, and in some ways it's the starting line, right? Of everything.

Larissa Salazar 21:01

It's an invitation in and your book, especially, but most books are an invitation to step into the deeper work that has to be done. Um, and so I think you're completely right. It's not the finale, it's not the conclusion, um, but it is an invitation in for people to start thinking differently um to thinking proactively. Um, and I just said people thinking proactively, but when you think of the people within an organization that holds the responsibility of customer experience, would you say it's just the leader? Would you say it's the customer service department? Like, how do you describe the right reader to pick up experiences everything?

CX Change Agents And Quick Wins

Jeannie Walters 21:52

Yeah, it's a great question, and it's it's not as straightforward to answer as I would like because as you and I have talked about, like these topics. Are all over the place. The responsibilities are all over the place. So I really wrote this for the people that I call the customer experience change agents. And those are anybody in the organization who knows this is important. Like they're, they're, they they understand it. They often are the cheerleaders of like, let's do this for our customers. But they don't always have the tools or the resources to figure out how do we actually take that next step. So it's not just something we're talking about, it's something that we're delivering on. And how do we operationalize that and connect the dots and all of those things? And one of my favorite bits of feedback from one of the early readers was that I, you know, I include a lot of like templates and um frameworks in here. And she's she said, Well, I had to stop reading your book. And I said, Why? And she said, Because that first Mad libs thing you put in there, I thought that was so great. And it was about the customer experience mission statement. She's like, I had to stop and do it. I was so motivated and I knew it would make a difference. And that just filled me with so much joy to know that somebody was able to take action right away in that moment. And that's really that's really my goal, right? Like people can take some action on their own, they can get that support if they need it. They we have all these additional resources to kind of go deeper if they want to, but it's been quite a journey, and you've been right along there with me. So thank you, Larissa.

Larissa Salazar 23:27

That's thank you. I'm so excited for people to finally be able to read this, as you just mentioned, implement some of the frameworks and exercises that are inside this book because it is so tangible and real and it provides not only the quick wins that you can really think through and start implementing today, but it invites you in to a deeper evaluation of everything that you can really push forward for change inside of your company, your organization, your brand. Um, so Jeannie, thank you for letting me be a small part of it. I'm so excited to see Experience is Everything be out in the world.

Jeannie Walters 24:08

Me too. I cannot wait. And thank you for being here with me today. And if if people want to reach out to you or learn more about you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Links Ways To Connect Closing

Larissa Salazar 24:17

Yes. So as Jeannie mentioned at the beginning of this episode, my name is Larissa Salazar and I am a personal brand strategist at Brand Builders Group. We work with authors, of course, but we also work with speakers, coaches, podcasters to really refine their message and do what we call build and monetize your personal brand. Um, and so if any of you would like to get in contact with Brand Builders Group, the way to get in contact with me will be in the show notes. I'll give them over to Jeannie. Um, but I would love to help any of you as well bring your message um out into the world.

Jeannie Walters 24:51

Well, thank you so much for your support on this journey. And it's not over. We we have more to do.

Larissa Salazar 24:57

So let's do it. We got to share it with everybody that we can.

Jeannie Walters 25:01

That's right. That's right. So thank you again. And I'm so glad you got your copy. And thank you, everybody, for being here with me on this very special episode of Experience Action and the CX Pulse Check. Now, I hope that you've already ordered your copy, but if not, please go ahead and find Experience is Everything wherever you order books, or you can check out all of the different ways we can support that at experienceiseverythingbook.com . Until next time, thanks for everything you're doing and for being those CX Change agents. I'll see you soon.